Wednesday, December 25, 2013

The hero or a villain

Richard Phillips Feynman was an
American theoretical physicist known for his work on particle physics
and quantum theory. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb
during World War II, though at a junior level. When the first ever
atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima in Japan, Feynman was reported
to have said:
“I returned to civilization
shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first
impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more,
but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for
example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you
know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and
so forth ... How far from here was 34th street?... All those
buildings, all smashed - and so on. And I would see people building a
bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy,
they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they
making new things? It's so useless. ”I find this reaction quite
natural as Feynman must have had a certain guilt in his mind about
having assisted in creation of a monster killer weapon that killed
more than 60000 to 70000 Japanese people in an instant.However if readers think that the
two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in WW II were the greatest killers,
they might be wrong as there is one deadly weapon around the world
that perhaps must have surpassed this number of kills of the atomic
bombs. This deadliest weapon is none other than a rifle named after
its designer Mikhail Kalashnikov. This Kalashnikov rifle is
popularly known as AK-47. The AK-47 is probably the only weapon that
has been used in almost every large scale conflict in the second half
of the 20th century, and can boast more kills than any other single
firearm. More than 100 million Kalashnikov rifles have been sold
worldwide and they are wielded by fighters in such far-flung conflict
zones as Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. This rifle and its variants
are the weapons of choice for dozens of armies and guerrilla groups
around the world. The weapon also has became synonymous with killing
on a sometimes indiscriminate scale and has received a bad name
because of its exclusive use by terrorist organizations. The AK-47
was designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1947, to provide better
weapons for the Soviet soldiers, who had earlier had big defeats in
the early years of World War II at the hands of far better armed
German soldiers. However it was never used against the Nazi Germany.

So what did Mikhail Kalashnikov
felt, when he heard about the massive killings done by terrorists
using the rifle, which he had designed. Unlike Feynman, Kalashnikov
had no guild in his mind. He had been honoured with the Soviet
Union’s top awards including the Lenin and the Stalin prizes. About
4 years back he was lavished with honours again including the
prestigious Hero of Russia prize for designing the iconic rifle to
mark his 90th
birthday. During the award ceremony, Kalashnikov has said he had
never intended the rifle to become the preferred weapon in conflicts
around the world. He said:
“I created a weapon to
defend the fatherland’s borders. It’s not my fault that it was
sometimes used where it shouldn’t have been. This is the fault of
politicians.” Kalashnikov was born in a
Siberian village as the 17th child of the family on November 10,
1919, He however had a tragic childhood as his father was deported
under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1930. He joined the army later
but was heavily wounded and shell-shocked in October 1941. He had
first conceived of the weapon while recovering in hospital. The rifle
soon
became famous and was prized for its sturdy reliability in difficult
field conditions.

Kalashnikov
however never gained financially from his invention and lived
modestly in Izhevsk, an industrial town 1,300 kilometres (800 miles)
east of Moscow. An ordnance factory that had become the principal
manufacturer of this famed rifle was located at Izmash, in the
central Russian region of Udmurtia. After the fall of USSR in 1991,
the orders placed by the Russian army for this order collapsed and
the factory fell on hard times. Kalashnikov had to make a personal
appeal to President Vladimir Putin for revival of the factory.

Mikhail
Kalashnikov, inventor of the deadly AK-47 rifle died on 23rd
December 2013. What would he be called? A hero or a villain? It is
for the readers to decide.

25th
December 2013

Postscript

Russian new agency Izvestia has now reproduced a letter written by Kalashnikov to head of Russian Orthodox Church shortly before his death to express guilt for those it had killed. "My spiritual pain is
unbearable. I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle took
away people's lives, then can it be that I... am guilty for people's
deaths, even if they were enemies?" he asked. The typed letter
on Kalashnikov's personal writing paper, reproduced by Izvestia, is
signed with a wavering hand by the man who describes himself as "a slave
of God, the designer Mikhail Kalashnikov." 14th January 2014